Good News / Bad News

Good news: Getting approval to have the company foot the bill for an intensive, one-week course at the London School of Economics on Applied Valuations & Business Analysis: • Performance analysis and implications for valuation. • Strategy analysis and implications for valuation. • Accounting and financial analysis. • Prospective analysis (forecasting). • Valuation and properties of different valuation techniques. • You will learn how to value stocks and firms using state-of-the-art valuation techniques based on present value of expected free cash flows or economic value added from financial statements. • You will understand how fundamental values and price multiples are related to future expected performance measures and risk. • You will appreciate how a firm’s future expected performance, and hence, price multiples, are affected by competitive strategy, the nature of the industry the firm is operating in, and the quality of accounting. • You will get exposure to empirical evidence on returns to trading strategies based on price multiples. Bad news: The course is two weeks *after* the CFA exam.

At least you’ll be sharp. I started studying for CAIA level 1 about two weeks after level 2 last year. It wasn’t so bad actually.